Analysis: San Jose's political elites overtaken by “false consensus effect” in public policy
As we reported last year, SJ City Council has a long history of taking stances on ballot propositions that voters then clearly contradict. This cycle, Council endorsed Prop 5—which soon got rejected both county- and state-wide. Alexander Furnas' study (discussed below) may explain this disconnect: political elites, of all partisanships, believe their policy opinions align more with public opinion than they actually do.
Matt Grossmann: When elites misperceive the public, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Political elites are often accused of being out of touch with the American public, not recognizing how their views and conditions are not reflective of most people’s experience, and caught in their own bubbles. Prior research found that elites tend to overestimate conservative policy positions in the American public, but today’s episode focuses on wider misperceptions across the political spectrum. This week I talked to Alexander Furnas of Northwestern University about his new paper with Tim Lapira, The People Think What I Think. He finds that unelected political elites, from government officials to lobbyists to media figures, all assume that public opinion more closely matches their own opinions than it really does. It’s not just conservatives whose perceptions are off. Everyone overestimates how much the public agrees with them on policy issues.
And elites might misperceive not only policy opinions, but also the circumstances the public faces. I also talked to Adam Thal of Loyola Marymount about his new British Journal of Political Science article, Do Political Elites Have Accurate Perceptions of Social Conditions? He finds that politicians overestimate the level of financial struggles facing their constituents, but correcting those misperceptions does not really change their opinions. Let’s start with my interview with Furnas, which develops from research suggesting politicians have biased perceptions of public opinion. So tell us about the biggest findings and takeaways from your latest paper on elite perceptions of public opinion.
Alex Furnas: I think the thing that was really striking to me about these findings is how consistent they are. So essentially, we find that across a whole range of policy issues, elites believe that the public’s opinion is more in line with their own opinions than they actually are. Essentially, we asked the public in a likely voter survey that we conducted, whether they support or oppose 10 different policy areas. And then we asked a set of elites in a similar survey, we asked them both whether they supported or opposed these policies and what percentage of the population they believed supported those policies. And we found that for policies that elites themselves strongly favored, they overestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. And for policies that they themselves strongly opposed, they underestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. So there’s sort of a 20 to 25 percentage point difference in elite evaluations of public support for policy, depending on whether the individual elite strongly supports or strongly opposes that policy.
If they sort of weakly support or weakly oppose, their over underestimation isn’t as strong, but it’s in the same direction. And so we found this is true across these policy issues. It’s true across different types of elites. So it’s true for folks who work in political media, it’s true for lawyers and lobbyists, it’s true for law clerks and judges. It’s true for state and local elected officials and state bureaucrats. It’s true for bureaucrats in the federal government. Across a whole bunch of categories of political elites, it’s true. And then we did a bunch of things in this paper to try to say, where might there be heterogeneity here? Is this effect stronger among strong partisans and less so among weak partisans because maybe there’s some sort of kind of partisan echo chamber here where they think, “Oh, I’m a really strong partisan and these are policies that have some partisan valence to them. And so I’m kind of anchoring on my own co- partisans.” And nope, there’s no difference based on the strength of partisanship.
One thing that we were really interested in was about how there are different professional norms across categories of elites about how important one’s partisanship is to their professional identity. If you’re a congressional staffer or you are a lobbyist that has strong revolving door ties to the Democratic Party or something, there are a bunch of types of elites where being partisan, if you’re working campaigns, being a member of a political party’s part of your job, and there are folks like law clerks or often political journalists who for them, they may have a private political identity or partisan identity, but there’s a professional norm that that is separate from what your job is. And so we developed a question battery to measure that and thought maybe these effects are stronger among people whose professional partisan identity is really important to them. And there’s no difference there either. We kept coming up with sort of…
Another was, well, maybe if you really trust copartisan information sources and really distrust information sources from the other party or sort of other ideological perspective, looked at the difference in your kind of partisan information trust. Because we didn’t actually have a direct measure of information use, so we couldn’t kind of directly measure kind of your information echo chamber stuff. So we looked at the differential trust in partisan information sources to see if you’re kind of more insular in that kind of way, does that lead to stronger effects? And again, it doesn’t. It sort of just, every way we sliced it, this what we call a false consensus effect. And it’s not our term. That’s a term out there from the literature. But what we find going on here is essentially this really persistent and pretty substantively large false consensus effect where elites believe the public believes what they do.
Read the whole thing here.
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